PUBLICATION Los Angeles
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Los Angeles: A Zone Beyond Time a personal perspective on 1975-1982 (fig.1) Relocating to Southern California in 1975 was an adjustment to Pacific Standard Time and to the persistence of shifting sands. That’s the year I landed in Los Angeles, specifically at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts), after a half-year residency in New York’s Soho, across the street from the art bookstore Jaap Reitman, and five years studying in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My knowledge of and connection to artists from LA dated to a few years before 1975, when I was a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), where I met Michael Asher, with whom I worked to record memories of his undocumented early installations for a forthcoming book published by Kasper Koenig of the NSCAD Press; John Baldessari, who I witnessed writing on a blackboard 100 times, “I will not make boring art;” and Simone Forti, also there for the publication of her book Handbook in Motion, 1974, by NSCAD Press, who, to my amazement, performed slow animal movements on the ground. I also participated in a Women’s Consciousness Raising 1 seminar in the summer of 1974 by artist Miriam Schapiro who was a founder of the Feminist Art Program at CalArts as well as of the exhibition, WomanHouse, Los Angeles. The majority of the art I was introduced to as a student was a crossbreed between conceptualism, minimalism, Fluxus, video, and performance, largely via New York, California, Canada, and Western Europe. Visiting artists routinely crisscrossed between Halifax, New York, and L.A., so when I did land in L.A., although the cultural geography was foreign, the art was not. Studying for an MFA at CalArts, 1975-1977, was not very different from studying in Halifax; in fact, my chief mentors at CalArts were Michael Asher and John Baldessari. All this is to say that regional concerns specific to Los Angeles were not made a priority. It was only a few years after graduating from CalArts that I became familiar with the L.A. regional aesthetic of Finish Fetish and Light and Space. To me the concept of Pacific Standard Time simply meant Los Angeles was three hours earlier than New York and four hours earlier than Halifax. I reveal this to make transparent an aspect of the Los Angeles art scene that in the mid 1970s was beyond its provincialism. My experience at the California Institute for the Arts was enriched by frequent visits by national and international artists invited to teach by John Baldessari. The Feminist Art Program was gone, and I never understood its demise, as it was never spoken about. The faculty was predominantly male, but the visiting artists that I recall most strikingly were women. Rebecca Horn, Ulrika Rosenbach, and Katarina Sieverding from Germany, all modeled provocative work that crossed the genres of sculpture, performance, and media, as did Laurie Anderson with her early experiments with mechanically altered human voices and musical instruments. John was very generous with his invitations to local artists as well; focusing on those whose work questioned and deconstructed traditional usage of textual, photographic, and film representations. Alexis Smith and Bill Leavitt were powerful examples. At the same time, it was not unusual to meet other local and international artists—Lawrence Weiner, David Lamellas, David Askevold, Robert Barry, Jon Borofsky—at John’s studio in Santa Monica, which was always open and frequented by his students. 2 Although painting and sculpture were taught and practiced, by far the strongest aspects of the program were influenced by conceptual and minimalist art, fueled by the theoretical texts we were reading mostly by French and German philosophers of post- structuralism, deconstruction, and new feminism. Conceptual artist Doug Huebler was dean of the art department; Michael Asher held class discourses that lasted six-plus hours; and all hybrid art production fell under the rubric of “Post Studio.” This laid the foundation for how I and many other students who remained in L.A. were to understand Los Angeles as beyond its time zone. What was regional about Los Angeles in the mid 1970s was how artists and art students tended to move in tribal packs, depending on the school they taught or studied at. Rarely did the tribes connect or exchange, except at art exhibitions at the few and far between venues. At the Otis Art Gallery by MacArthur Park, directed by Hall Glicksman, I saw the brilliantly simple conceptual paintings on marking time of On Kawara. At Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA), I recall the exhibition, curated by Tom Jimmerson, Michael Asher, David Askevold, and Richard Long, where the stream of consciousness singing emanating from the Askevold video mixed strangely with Long’s formal and meditative floor pattern made of sticks that he had collected from a timed desert walk; meanwhile, a group of young artists, including me, assigned by Asher to meet hourly at the gallery, sat on chairs and talked about art. Peripheral but strong were the public lectures presented by Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in Santa Monica, which sponsored international architects—e.g. Bernard Tsumi, whose work was deeply involved in cultural critique. Strong performative exhibitions took place at a handful of small galleries. The Claire Copley Gallery bravely showed the conceptual work of Bill Leavitt, Bas Jan Ader, and most memorably a performative, sculptural project by Michael Asher where he simply took down the gallery wall that normally concealed the office behind the exhibition space, removing the separation between art and business. The Morgan Thomas Gallery, where I worked part time as a graduate student, often exhibited poetic performative works including record albums by Jack Goldstein, text and sculpture by Al Ruppersburg and Raoul Guerrero, huge wall drawings by Jon Borofsky, conceptual photo work by Doug 3 Huebler, ephemeral objects and performance by James Lee Byars, and sculptural film by John Baldessari. The Rosamund Felsen Gallery, in 1979, presented Chris Burden’s The Big Wheel on the sidewalk outside the gallery pointing towards its storefront window. Essentially, a motorcycle was tethered to a gigantic stone or cement wheel, which framed it like a hamster wheel. I recall Burden getting on the motorcycle, revving its engine to the point of a potential danger of the wheel snapping off its frame like a slingshot aimed at the gallery. Two years later, Chris would stage a “kidnapping” of Ericka Beckman (filmmaker) and myself at gunpoint, drive us out to Topanga late at night, and fire his gun at passing airplanes, mimicking his earlier performance Shoot. At the same time, there was a growing movement of female performance artists in Los Angeles, notably Susanne Lacy, Barbara T. Smith, and The Waitresses, as well as artists working in other cultural contexts coming from sensibilities that were more social and identity-based. To those of us who came from an aesthetic tradition more philosophically based, there was a gulf to bridge. Aesthetic and cultural differences were also evident between arts organizations, as each worked almost exclusively within their own racial and gender contexts. Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) focused on Chicano sociopolitical issues; Self-Help Graphics & Art worked primarily with Latino and Chicano artists; the Woman’s Building included only feminist women artists. Watts Community Arts Center was mostly African-American; there was an Asian-American film collective and Korean art groups, but there was barely any interaction between them. Meanwhile LAICA, Los Angeles Contemporary Art Exhibitions (LACE), (although initiated by diverse artists, including Chicano artists), Beyond Baroque, and Foundation for Art Resources (FAR) were essentially white. Gender, sexuality, and race were often segregated reflecting the dominant cultural context of the time. A more public approach to art practice was certainly percolating. What stirred me most was a growing realization of the privatization and institutionalization of art and art practice by art schools, galleries, collectors, and museums. In 1976 I wrote a paper titled “I Am Not Only Lonely,” questioning the collusion of artists with these forms of institutionalization, which I submitted to that year’s College Art Association panel “The 4 Education of the Artist.” It was rejected. In an ironic twist, John Baldessari, who was scheduled to speak, chose to read my paper as his participation on the panel. In 1978, LAICA hosted a conference on Alternative Artist Spaces, a growing movement of nonprofit arts organizations that promised more support for experimentation than was available from commercial galleries and museums. I became suspicious when I noticed that only one independent artist, Lawrence Weiner, was included amongst the invited national speakers. How was it possible to discuss alternative support for art and artists with minimal inclusion of artists in the dialogue? This blindly patronizing platform provoked me to mail a postcard with the question, “Do you think you are a part of this?” to one hundred local artists. Sixty of them showed up to a meeting where we decided to ask the conference leaders for time to address participants. When we received their rejection, we conceived a plan to show up at the inaugural dinner at the Santa Monica Biltmore Hotel, and sit on folding chairs, surrounding the dining participants. Be careful what you ask for. It was the National Endowment for the Arts director who broke the ice at the inaugural evening, acknowledging our presence and inviting us to take the mic at the podium. Guess who was pushed forward to speak? It was my first time speaking before a public; I froze solid. Not a squeak passed through my vocal cords.